German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research

Linking vegetation and plant trait databases

12th meeting on vegetation databases

German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research,

Leipzig, 4th- 6th March 2013

The German working group on vegetation databases is dedicated to building, maintaining, linking and analysing electronic archives of vegetation plot data and provides the national repository “VegetWeb”, hosted by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN). The 12th workshop will be hosted by the new German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig, Germany. The central mission of iDiv is to promote theory-driven experiments and synthesis as well as data-driven theory. The concept of iDiv encompasses the detection of biodiversity, understanding its emergence, exploring its consequences for ecosystem functions and services, and developing strategies to safeguard biodiversity under global change. In this context, the combined synthesis of species abundance and distribution data together with information on species characteristics is seen as a high potential to advance our understanding of community assembly and plant diversity patterns. For this reason, important databases have already become part of iDiv's data research platforms, such as the German Vegetation Reference Database (GVRD), the plant trait databases TRY and BIOLFLOR and the Chorology Database Halle (CDH) on plant distribution data. In this workshop, we seek to explore the potentials of such databases for future research, with a specific focus on vegetation databases.

We particularly invite contributions on:

Linking trait and vegetation databases

Functional aspects of vegetation classification

Testing significance of adaptive traits

Functional biodiversity

Functional significance of vegetation change

Advances in building, linking and analysing vegetation databases

While vegetation and plant trait databases are in the main focus of the workshop, we also invite the submission of contributions associated with the general aims of the Working Group, such as the presentation of new methods, new software tools, or new databases.

Provisionally, we have reserved Monday, 4th March, 9:00-12:00 for workshops, software demonstration or other optional meetings. Please contact the organisers if you want to offer such a contribution or have suggestions. The official vegetation database meeting period is scheduled from Monday, 4th March 13:00 until Wednesday, 6th March 12:00.

Online registration is available at http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/idiv_meeting_2013.html or via the iDiv homepage (www.iDiv-biodiversity.de). Please register for participation in the 12th meeting on vegetation databases and submit title and abstract for posters and talks not later than 31 January 2013. Advertise offers for workshops or software demonstration via email to the organisers. Registered participants will receive updated information via email.

We hope that this call stimulates further information exchange and collaboration in the database community and look forward to meeting you in Leipzig,